The Minchews are a large family – eight children by one mother and three different fathers – who share a notable similarity in appearance and an equally notable capacity to bear a grudge. They haven't been able to stay in the same room together for decades without all hell breaking loose, but now that Stewart – the fifth sibling – has had a cancer scare, he has decided the time has come for his fissured family to start filling in the cracks.

We Are Family followed the Minchews as they converged on a country house for the weekend to start this mammoth task.

Remarkably similar anxious smiles are pinned on those remarkably similar anxious faces as they gather for drinks in the drawing room. Those who are talking to each other talk to each other. Those who aren't, don't. The air is filled with chatter and tension.

In some cases, the origins of the various feuds are lost in mists of time – it being one of the defining features of blood relations that each party can forget but never forgive. Others stand out as clear as day. Stewart and David fell out nearly 20 years ago when Stewart, the family hard man, barged into David's house shouting the odds and frightening his (absent) brother's wife and children. Stewart has not apologised. "I didn't think what I said needed it," he says, to camera rather than David. "But perhaps I did need to."

Recovering alcoholic Noel was ostracised after he borrowed against a house owned by his late stepfather, Harry (who treated all the children as his own and whose memory is the one thing cherished unreservedly by all), for an unsuccessful business venture and never made restitution – financially or verbally – for losing it.

In the closing scenes, apologies – difficult, awkward and occasionally not quite for the offence perceived by the wronged party – were offered and accepted. Forgiveness didn't fill the air, but it made its presence felt.

It was a graceful and moving documentary, though I have a terrible sense of foreboding that it may set off a chain of highly graceless reality shows built round the same conceit. That I shall never forgive.